Friday, March 31, 2006

Cornbread Nation

Festival lineup leaf readers have been wondering why Tim O'Brien's band is billed at Grey Fox as "Cornbread Nation" while on other lineups it is labeled more generically as the "Tim O'Brien Band." Now we have word from Tim himself that the band comprises Danny Barnes (banjo, electric guitar, vocals), Casey Driessen (fiddle), and Dennis Crouch (bass). That still leaves the naming mystery unresolved since it's same configuration that will play Telluride.

Our hunch is that Tim is using a naming convention that matches his two recent CDs, in which Cornbread Nation used electric instruments and Fiddler's Green was all-acoustic. If so, we might expect the Telluride listing to be updated and other O'Brien dates (such as Kate Wolf, perhaps) to be billed as "Tim O'Brien & Fiddler's Green."

But maybe that is just too much navel-gazing, since the official Tim O'Brien site makes no distinction on its On Tour page, listing all dates as just "Tim O'Brien" (except for those with sister Mollie). Another explanation is that the Grey Fox marketing people are just being creative.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When Tim played at Station Inn a few weeks ago, he used one of his older band names, The Crossing, which included Russ Barenberg, Casey Driessen, Bill Verdier, Dennis Crouch, Kenny Malone, John Mock, Todd Suttles, Odessa Settles. A couple of cuts from that performance are available on his web site.